Jellyfish Reads: monthly wrap-up

Showing posts with label monthly wrap-up. Show all posts

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Monthly Wrap-Up: June 2014

On the blog last month

June wasn't a great blogging month for me. It's taken me until 2 July to even put this wrap-up post together... I haven't replied to comments in forever, I haven't read nearly as many books as I would like, I've been failing to keep up with other blogs for the most part, I haven't managed to do Sunday Posts for the past two weeks... ): But hopefully July will be a better month!

I reviewed 10 books in June. Of these, 5 were for Mental Health Awareness Month (I've put an asterisk by those).

Best of the bunch? That would be Crazy by Amy Reed, which I loved for its interesting format (the story is told mostly through emails between the two MCs) and its heartfelt emotion and gut-wrenchingly beautiful writing. A dizzyingly captivating story about a girl with bipolar disorder and the boy who falls in love with her.

I enjoyed Mental Health Awareness Month, though I was planning to read at least 6 books for it and I only managed to read 5.

Even though June was Pride Month, I failed to read any books with a real focus on LGBTQ content. This makes me sad. The Snake Charm is a short story set in the universe of the Micah Grey series though, which is a wonderful LGBTQ series, and the MC of The Snake Charm is Drystan, who as we know from the series is not straight, though this is not brought up in The Snake Charm. Crazy featured an unusually high number of side characters who were LGBTQ (four!) for a book whose MCs were not queer. But other than that, none of the books I read even featured any minor LGBTQ characters.

I bought Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis thinking I would manage to read it in June, but that did not happen. I will try to read this month or next.

(Cayce @ Fighting Dreamer made an absolutely awesome rainbow of YA LGBTQ books for Pride Month though! :D Go check it out!)

What have I been doing the past two weeks? Uh, I watched The Fault in Our Stars, which made me weep starting from about halfway through the film till the very end. Strange experience, watching half the film through such blurry vision. I went to Scotland. The Isle of Skye is so pretty! What with all the long car journeys I had, I finally managed to catch up with Welcome to Night Vale, which is ABSOLUTELY GLORIOUS. Then I went to a ball which lasted from about 8pm till 6am, which was fun. After that I flew home to Hong Kong. And now here I am in Hong Kong. Until 27 July, when I will fly back to England again to start my summer internship.

I don't really have any special plans for July, only the hope that I'll at least read one LGBTQ book. Plus I've been meaning to do a Strange Chemistry giveaway ever since I heard the sad news about them closing, so hopefully I will get around to that soon!

How are you all? Sorry I've been so terrible at replying to comments! I WILL CATCH UP SOON, I PROMISE.

Saturday, 31 May 2014

Monthly Wrap-Up: May 2014

On the blog this month

This month I reviewed a total of 11 books!

Best of the bunch? That would probably have to be The Glass Republic by Tom Pollock! It was an intense and riveting sequel to The City's Son, and I loved Pen as the protagonist so much.

Of these, 6 were books I'd classify as LGBTQ. That's The Beast of Callaire (lesbian MC, bisexual love interest), Coda (bisexual MC), Tides (a relationship between two ladies that's not the central romance but a major focus nonetheless), Shadowplay (intersex genderfluid bisexual MC), Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (gay MCs), and The Glass Republic (female MC who likes girls – not entirely sure if she would identify as lesbian or bisexual). Blue had a minor gay character whose storyline was a pretty good side plot, but it was not major enough that I'd put it in my LGBTQ tag.

I also posted my first ever discussion post!

Discussion: Grandparents and Parents in YA

And I participated in Armchair BEA!

Oh, and I started participating in the Sunday Post meme and posting my book hauls every Sunday. Including this post, I made 23 posts this month! That's 90% more posts than last month. o:

Coming up next month

June is Mental Health Awareness Month, hosted by Ula @ Blog of Erised and Leah @ Uncorked Thoughts. (It's not too late to sign up if you haven't already! Sign-ups are open for one more day.) I currently have a list of six books to read for this event.

Crazy by Amy Reed
I Don't Want to be Crazy by Samantha Schutz
Amy & Matthew by Cammie McGovern
A Voice in the Distance by Tabitha Suzuma
Dr Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos
These Gentle Wounds by Helene Dunbar

I may add to this list, but I have a lot of other things on my TBR too! The rest of my TBR is probably constantly shifting, so I won't put it here.

What was your favourite book that you read this month? (:

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Monthly Wrap-Up: March & April 2014

I started this blog and posted my very first entry on 16 March, less than two months ago! So here's my first wrap-up post. I'll be doing these monthly from now on, just to talk about what books I've read, and what books I'm planning to read, and maybe do quick updates on my life just so you know how many posts you can expect from me in the next month.

In the past month and a half I have read and reviewed 14 books! Below are the titles:

(Click on the cover to read the review!)
March

April

My favourites from March and April were:

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily m. danforth
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
A Kiss in the Dark by Cat Clarke
Pantomime by Laura Lam

I took part in LGBT April and out of the 11 books that I read in April, 9 had a heavy focus on LGBT content. The two exceptions were The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider and The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, which also had gay characters in them, but their gayness wasn't central to the books.

Overall in March and April, I read 11 books where LGBT content was central to the book! (And all 14 books I read had at least one non-straight character.)

I think what I enjoyed most about LGBT April was that for the first time ever, at least if I'm remembering correctly, I finally read a book with a bisexual main character. And not just one, but FOUR. FOUR!!! Since I'm bisexual, this has made me very happy; there weren't really any bisexual MCs in YA just a couple years ago, and the one book that I knew about that did have bisexual MCs didn't really interest me. (Alex Sanchez' Boyfriends with Girlfriends, for those curious.)

Anyway, the four books I've reviewed with bisexual MCs:

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
Adaptation by Malinda Lo
Pantomime by Laura Lam

Coming up next month

On May 1, 2, and 3, there's a campaign going on which you've probably heard about: We Need Diverse Books. I'm excited about this campaign because we do need diverse books. I need diverse books, and as you can see, I read a lot of them. But there's not enough. As a Chinese bisexual girl, I've yet to see another Chinese bisexual girl in the fiction I read. I'd really like to see myself reflected in a book sometime.

So, for the month of May, I'm committing myself to reading more diverse books! I've got a copy of Coda by Emma Trevayne (which has a bisexual MC, yay!), and I need to finish reading Aristotle and Dante Discovers the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saénz, which I started reading for the LGBT April Read-along but never finished since I was in the mood for something a little more fast-paced and thrilling. I've also got various other books ordered, including The Elites by Natasha Ngan, the cover of which looks like this:

When I first saw this in a bookshop, I flailed in delight. A YA FANTASY BOOK WITH AN ASIAN (well, half-Asian, as it turns out) GIRL ON THE COVER!!! It's a really damn pretty cover too. Ahhhhhhhhh. I'm so excited.

I really care about diversity in books, and I'll try my best to continue buying and talking about diverse books as often as I can!